Dealing damage to tanky people

Dealing damage to tanky people

I would like to know how you are meant to deal damage to tanky people. I don't just mean people who buy a little bit of defence, I mean people who do almost nothing but stack defence. frozen heart, thornmail, banshees, abyssals. I mean people who have such high output despite making almost no dps investment. for example, urgot, malphite, jarvan, renekton. I don't understand what I am supposed to do here and it has gotten to the point where I have thought about simply quitting the game completely. It is tiring to me that spending 3830 gold on an Infinity Edge is worthless when the enemy can simply spend 1350 gold on a Warden's Mail and cut my damage by 50% to 60% and cut my attack speed and there feels like nothing I can do about this. This doesn't need to be the tank or bruiser, it can be anyone and often with the case of frozen heart IS anyone and everyone.

Am I supposed to split push? Am I supposed to rush last whisper first? As an example, I played ad sivir versus a malphite top and crushed him completely. I mean about 40~50 cs ahead, his jungler had to basicly stop jungling to come and deal with me. I had +80 ad on me but what happened? He rushed thornmail. And then couldn't lose the lane at all. I had 2 dorans blades, wriggles, berserkers, a b.f. sword and he had ninja tabis and thornmail and the lane was INSTANTLY lost. What should I have done? Not gone ad sivir top? But I completely crushed the lane... And with people like Udyr going tanky too, I doubt going bot would be any better....

I would appreciate any help.... I cannot deal with this and it is basicly every second game where a galio decides "Okay I'll go frozen heart and carry to victory because the ad carry can't kill me and the ap carry can't kill me so why not buy it?". I don't know what to do anymore.

Simply put, don't go top with an AD carry.
Mid may be more acceptable if you can't go bot, since most of the time the AP in the mid won't buy a Warden's or Thornmail or whatever the case is.
However, I feel like you still didn't lose your lane, if you are in a situation like that then I guess your best bet is to just stick to farming, maybe do some harass and poking, wait until they recall, then take their tower.

ad carries top actually aren't bad, you can out sustain and out harass lots of champs with them...if someone rushes thornmail, they are most likely pretty bad..just wait for team fights to happen and don't target them. after IE and zeal/PD i almost always get last whisper because enemies love to stack armor. if you notice people are getting that much armor that early, then buy your last whisper early. never a terrible mistake.

Okay but that was just one example of how much armour turned a lane around. There have been several games when I was bot like a normal ad carry and yet people still simply tanked all my damage by virtue of simply building armour on everyone. My worst game in that respect so far was :

Urgot with frozen heart and randuins
janna with randuins
kennen with hourglass
hecarim with frozen heart
Swain with chainmail, he was the last to buy it

What can you possibly do? How can you even stop them from doing this, it wasn't even like we were feeding them. When a Janna buys oracles, rushes randuins and is thus unkillable, how can you recover?

Okay but that was just one example of how much armour turned a lane around. There have been several games when I was bot like a normal ad carry and yet people still simply tanked all my damage by virtue of simply building armour on everyone. My worst game in that respect so far was :

Urgot with frozen heart and randuins
janna with randuins
kennen with hourglass
hecarim with frozen heart
Swain with chainmail, he was the last to buy it

What can you possibly do? How can you even stop them from doing this, it wasn't even like we were feeding them. When a Janna buys oracles, rushes randuins and is thus unkillable, how can you recover?

Everyone has a role
if you are having problems with tanky champs
have your AP carry stack 1000+ ap and just range harass

I had a game
2 mages stacked 1600+ ap (no boot) and just stayed in the back spamming their range skill and just try to protect those carries

Well, you have mixed damage types on your team for a reason, so if they start stacking armor, then your AP champs should be able to hit pretty hard. If they stack MR, then you'll hit hard. If they stack both, then they won't be able to hit hard, and thus, you should be able to stay alive easier.

Also, once you realize you're hardly doing any damage to them, it's probably smart to go ahead and get a LW. I wouldn't get it before IE, but something like boots, IE, zeal, LW, vamp scepter might be good. Really, once you get LW, there's not a lot you can do. Make sure you have life steal so you can stay alive and keep putting out damage.

(This is assuming mid game, not late game)
If you think about it, even if you're only hitting like 300s (which is about right for a crit when you have IE and LW and the enemy has a decent amount of armor) you're doing a lot of damage. Let's just say you attack 1.5 times per second. Every 2 seconds, you attack 3 times. You're doing 450ish DPS in that case. So a mage will blow all their skills early on and do ~1500 damage (assumed 400ish AP on Ahri and eyeballed the damage, probably off by a bit) and then pretty much be out for a while.
As a DPS (or carry) you're constantly dishing out ~450 damage a second. So over 10 seconds (reasonable for a team fight IMO) you could potentially put out 4k+ damage. The mage on the other hand, will blow all their skills in the first 3-5 seconds, then maybe put out another ~700 damage at most.
Essentially, I'm just trying to show you that although it may not seem like you're doing a lot of damage (like chunking enemy HP bars away every auto attack), you're still doing quite a bit. It's just more constant and over time rather than really quick like a mage or assassin, and in the end, you'll do more.

With that out of the way, to answer you questions more specifically...

1. You can switch lanes with someone if your enemy stacks armor (preferably switch with an AP champ, of course)
2. As I said earlier, make sure your team has both physical and magical damage sources
3. Take an early LW if needed, even it means buying it before PD or BT
4. If they build a thornmail, you will need more life steal and magic resistance to counteract it (it deals magic damage back to you)
5. If the enemy team is all stacking lots of armor:
a. If they do this early game, they shouldn't have enough damage to really kill you, or your team for that matter, unless you guys are already way behind or are horribly out of position. You may consider stacking an extra doran's blade or something to help stay alive easier.
b. If they're doing this late game, then there's not really any answer because pretty much every champ will include survivability (especially armor) in their build at some point to help against the growing power of the AD carries later in the game. You just need to stay alive (positioning and teamwork) and keep chipping at their health with your 500-1000 DPS auto attacks.

Well that was a lot of typing, I hope it helps. I lost track of what I was trying to say a lot (texts/phone calls/disturbances etc) so it may not all make sense, but I hope it helps nonetheless

If you're top against a bruiser/tanky dps/off tank, just farm and you're an AD carry... safely poke, and wait for ganks.

When laning phase is over, priority targets are the AP/AD carries anyway. Focus tanky people when carries have been taken out. You should have your team to back you up when the time comes to focus these guys. You're not meant to 1vs1 them anyway...unless they're bad tanks.